Pizzagate Is Just the Latest Sign We're Living in a Post-Truth Dystopia

Luke O'Neil
Updated
Photo credit: EPA/Newscom
Photo credit: EPA/Newscom

From Esquire

On Sunday, a man was arrested after walking into a D.C. restaurant and firing at least one shot from an AR-15 rifle. Such an incident would not normally be considered national news in our trigger-happy culture, but the apparent motivation for this particular crime stands out. Edgar Welch, a 28-year-old from North Carolina, reportedly told police that he had come to the Comet Ping Pong pizza shop to self-investigate "Pizzagate," an exceedingly dumb right-wing hoax even graded on the forgiving curve for right-wing hoaxes.

You could drive yourself mad trying to unpack all the convoluted leaps of logic and flights of paranoid gullibility that have led hundreds of self-styled internet gumshoes-largely driven by Trump supporters in the seedier corners of the internet's rumor mill-to believe the claims behind the viral hoax. The theory, so crazy that even Reddit banned the page discussing it, goes as such: Hillary Clinton and John Podesta are at the center of a vast child-trafficking scheme with a pedophilia rape dungeon that just so happens to be located in the basement of an innocuous D.C. pizza shop. The idiotic allegations arose after people play-acting Nancy Drew combed over Podesta's leaked emails and uncovered a truly damning plot.

This is by no means the first time an apparently unwell person believing nonsense they read online has resulted in dangerous real-world consequences. A couple of years ago an elementary school in San Francisco was subjected to dozens of harassing calls with threats of violence against administrators after a fraudulent story alleged a student was suspended for wishing an atheist teacher "Merry Christmas." The aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing was a high-profile disaster of internet sleuthing and conspiracy peddling leading to all manner of false accusations against innocent people. More recently, a number of actresses have been wrongly portrayed as victims of violence at Trump rallies, leading to confusion and harassment in their real lives. This year's spate of so-called scary clown incidents led to hysteria in various states and numerous arrests for giving police false reports or making threats. For years now, trolls have "swatted" targets of their ire, sending law enforcement agencies to their homes to investigate invented crises.

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Fortunately, there was no significant violence at Comet Ping Pong. But it's not hard to imagine that incidents like this are only going to get worse in our current post-truth dystopia. These days, conspiracies like Pizzagate often come with the imprimatur of people in power. Just this week, Paul Ryan and Reince Priebus declined to deny Donald Trump's baseless accusations that millions of illegal votes were cast in the election. Hate crimes have risen dramatically since the election-which the right has claimed is a hoax itself. It's not a big leap to imagine Trump voters-many of who are armed and whipped into a frenzy by their politicians about the threat of "illegals"-taking matters into their own hands.

The Pizzagate narrative has been pushed by establishment figures too. General Michael Flynn, Trump's incoming national security advisor, tweeted a story claiming to show evidence of links between Clinton and the pedophilia last month, and his son just yesterday continued to push the false narrative.

With people on both sides of the political spectrum unwilling to believe anything from the other, the very concept of factual information is under assault. It shouldn't take a potential shooting to make us take this issue seriously. Violence against a person is a terrible crime, but so is the death of an entire institution.

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